In “Stoker’s Manuscript,” debut novelist Royce Prouty tells a vampire story featuring a rare book dealer who’s asked to authenticate the original draft of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” published in 1897. The deal he’s offered seems too good to be true, which of course it is.

There’s long been some mystery surrounding changes in the manuscript between what Stoker first wrote and what wound up being published. Prouty mixes fact, rumor and imagination to suggest that the ending was altered to protect a certain sharp-teethed family’s secrets.

By day, Prouty is a certified public accountant with a passion for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. He’s in his mid-50s and lives in Long Beach. He’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy today at 2 p.m.

Q: I understand this novel started with an agent rejecting another book of yours.

A: I had finished an action-adventure story set in Alaska. I kept getting rejection letters that said, “Oh, we really like it but we don’t think we can sell it.” I went through that with about four different agents, and one of them said right at the tail end of the conversation, “But do you have any vampire stories?”

And I’m going, ”What? Vampires?” I hadn’t even read the original. We have a tradition in our household that every Halloween I read out loud to my wife some kind of horror story. We chose “Dracula” this time. We were both disappointed at the ending. Here’s this glorious book, and then right at the end Dracula gets ambushed by the heroes, stabbed, turns to dust and that’s the end of the story. Seems like this inglorious ending to a glorious novel.

Our copy of the book was this beautiful 100th anniversary edition, and it had a lot of annotated material, some of the rumors and lore that surrounded the book, like how the original had 28 chapters in it, and then after a fire at the publishing house, the book re-emerged with 27 chapters and the whole ending was different. My wife and I looked at each other and said, “There’s something wrong with this.” And she said, “Maybe they don’t want you to know where he’s buried.” And the following morning, the whole story for my book came into my head, from start to finish.

Q: It’s not supposed to happen that way, you know.

A: All my stories come in all at once, the whole storyline from start to finish, including the ending conflict scenes, the characters, their voices, the setting. I can visually see where it’s happening. So as I sit down to write the story, it comes out rather quickly because I’m not really looking at a blank page. I’m trying to get out what is already inside of me.

Q: I’m going to traffic in a bit of a stereotype here, but CPAs aren’t generally known for their vivid imaginations. Where does yours come from?

A: (He laughed.) I’ve always been a bit of a storyteller. And most of the time working as a CPA, my concentration has not been in tax. It’s been more in small companies, turning businesses around. Basically the creative end that says, “OK, we have a problem here and now we have to fix it.”

Q: How long have you been writing on the side?

A: Close to 15 years, ever since the first time a story came into my head. It was like, “What is this?” When it happens, it’s big. There’s no mistaking it. It’s a very profound experience.

Q: What kind of research did you do for this book?

A: I quickly wrote down a story synopsis and character sketches and I sent them off up to a professional editor. He suggested I read several recently released vampire stories (“The Historian,” by Elizabeth Kostova, and “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” by Dacre Stoker, the original author’s great-grandnephew) to make sure I wasn’t treading on any common ground. Fortunately, nothing was really common about them.

I went back about 25 years to something from (“Star Trek” creator) Gene Roddenberry. He said when it comes to science fiction, picture a river meandering through two lands. You’re over on one side and science fiction is on the other side. What you’re trying to do with science fiction is construct a bridge in such a way that when you are holding the reader’s hand and you are taking them across the bridge, by the time they ask, “Can this really happen?” then they are already on the other side and you are free to roam in science fiction land. You have them.

Q: So what bridge did you have to build?

A: Bram Stoker already built that bridge. He created the vampires, so you’re not selling a brand-new character. But I really felt it necessary to reinforce that bridge, to bring it up to code if you will, because it was built in the 1890s.

I wanted to explain through modern science and understanding what these creatures are and further what they’re not. For me, shape-shifting by vampires never works. That’s just my taste. Flying, that doesn’t work, either. Moving very quickly and being pumped up on adrenaline? That kind of works for me.

Q: Did you travel to Transylvania?

A: I went there exactly as many times as Bram Stoker did. Which is zero.

Q: When you started on this, were you worried about vampires being overdone?

A: No. The current genre that includes romance was certainly nothing that I was going to go up against. I never saw vampires as warm and fuzzy romantic creatures. I always envisioned them as sinister creatures of the night, encounters with which are always going to end badly for the humans.